


the way home

by maharlika



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Animal Transformation, Fluff and Angst, Growing Old Together, Humor, M/M, Old Married Couple, One Shot Collection, Post-Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Uncle Loki (Marvel), Uncle/Nephew Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-13
Updated: 2020-08-13
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:42:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25872304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maharlika/pseuds/maharlika
Summary: Three short fics written for hardwareupgrade for a gift exchange!1. Human AU age gap - Loki is soft for his nephew.2. Old men Thorki - Old men shenanigans and softness.3. Snake Loki - After Ragnarok, Loki takes to his snake form.
Relationships: Loki/Thor (Marvel)
Comments: 38
Kudos: 187
Collections: Best Thorkis, Thorki Eggxchange 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hardwareupgrade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hardwareupgrade/gifts).



> written for rowan and for the thorki egg gc ❤️

Loki leaned against the doorway and waited patiently for Thor to look up, though he didn’t expect the swift lance of emotion—concern and anger and _love_ all at once—when his nephew finally did. 

“He…he told me I shouldn’t come h-home anymore,” Thor said, glancing up at Loki, his valiant smile trembling, and then crumbling altogether. His head dropped back down and he inhaled shakily. 

“It’s a good thing you live here then,” Loki said, in a measured tone.

Thor made a strangled sound, half-laugh, half-sob, and Loki finally went over to him. 

As soon as he was close enough, Thor leaned his head against Loki’s thigh. Loki carded his fingers through soft blond hair, gentle, while he tried to sort out his thoughts. It still took him aback, the easy trust Thor had placed in him. 

“Your father is a blind fool if he can’t see the worth in you,” he said, trying to keep the anger out of his voice. He likely failed miserably, if the way Thor’s shoulders shook was any indication.

“Oh, sweetheart, I’m sorry,” Loki said, giving in to his most tender instincts. 

It was worth it, though, when Thor wrapped his arms around Loki’s legs and hugged him. 

“I can’t believe I thought you were a hard-ass,” Thor said, muffled against Loki’s pants.

“I still am,” Loki said sternly. He traced the curve of Thor’s ears and sighed. “But I do admit I’ve gone soft for you.”

“Good,” Thor murmured. Then he turned his face into the space between Loki’s legs, with _intent_ , and Loki put a hand on his head to put him off. 

“You don’t have to,” Loki said. 

Thor stiffened. 

“Thor…you should know by now that I…I care for you, whatever our physical relationship may be.” Loki took a deep, steadying breath. “I’ll continue to support your studies and your needs. No matter what. So. You don’t have to.”

When Thor looked up, Loki was so relieved to see the genuine smile on his face that he didn’t notice the slant of mischief in it.

“Okay,” Thor said, easily, “but I want to, though.”

“You little asshole,” Loki sighed. 

Thor laughed, hands already coming around to undo the buckles of Loki’s belt. 

Loki bit off a moan when Thor’s mouth descended upon his cock. It was warm and wet, and so good, so practiced, now, after all the months they’d been doing this. 

Despite Thor’s easy demeanour from just moments before, Loki could feel the tension in him. When he choked after taking Loki too deep too quickly, Loki slid a hand through his hair and tugged at it in reprimand. His other hand went to Thor’s throat to stroke it in gentle reminder. 

“Easy, darling,” Loki murmured, eyes falling shut as he and Thor established a rhythm. “Mmm, hard to believe you’d never sucked a cock before mine.”

Thor pulled off with a wet noise, until his lips were pursed only around the head of Loki’s cock, his tongue lapping at the slit in a way that had Loki’s knees shaking.

It was all over embarrassingly fast. 

When he came back to himself, Thor was casually licking a drop of Loki’s spend from the corner of his mouth, his posture soft and pliant. 

“You’ve gotten scarily good at that,” Loki said, another little dollop of honesty to soothe what remained of Thor’s worries. 

“How else am I supposed to keep you?” Thor grinned. 

Loki snorted, pushing at his shoulders until Thor backed up further along on the bed. 

“We’ll see who’s keeping who,” Loki said, but he knew. They both knew.

The most precious thing about this love, after all, was that it went both ways. 


	2. Chapter 2

Thor realized they were old on the day Loki sprained his hip riding him. After that was an adrenaline-fueled rush to the hospital, and so Thor picked Loki up in his arms and bore him to the car without thinking about it.

They alternated between hysterical laughter and nervous fidgeting, Loki groaning in pain every time they had to go over a speedbump. At the hospital, Loki was transferred carefully into a wheelchair, and then brought into the emergency room.

The blushes on their faces were explanation enough.

“This happens more often than you’d think, Mr. Odinson,” the doctor said, shaking her head with a smile.

“You should check his back,” Loki said, sly, his eyes bright despite the too-pale cast of his skin, gone bloodless from the pain. “He carried me to the car because he thinks he’s still 35.”

“I’m fine,” Thor grumbled, then groaned as he sank down on the bed beside Loki.

The doctor laughed. She sent them home with painkillers and instructions to keep the pressure off of their injuries, telling them to take care of each other, and how. The personnel in charge of billing assumed they were husbands. Thor hadn’t corrected that assumption in decades.

—

Back home, Thor carefully helped Loki into bed, then went puttering about the kitchen to make tea and sandwiches.

It was so strange, he thought, as he went through the motions: kettle on, tea in the infuser, bread in the pan for a quick grill. He’d worried about ageing much more when he’d been younger. By the time he’d hit 50, it had barely registered to him anymore. Even now, it seemed as if his whole life was still spread out ahead of him, infinite. He and Loki had worked so hard to get here, to build a life that was wholly theirs, as free from secrets as they could make it. Thor had tried to live it with as few regrets as possible.

When he went back to their room, he found his brother sitting up, propped up on his and Thor’s pillows, using his phone’s selfie camera to study his face.

“So,” Thor said, setting their meal on the bedside table. “Guess we’re old, huh?”

“Speak for yourself,” Loki said, clicking his phone off with a sigh.

“You’re still as beautiful as the day we met,” Thor teased, leaning in to kiss Loki’s forehead.

Loki let him linger for a moment before pulling away. “We _met_ at the hospital after Mama gave birth to me.”

“How could I forget?” Thor asked with a wink. “You were the cutest little thing I’d ever seen.”

Loki snorted, then winced, his hand rubbing at his hip.

Thor put his hand on top of Loki’s, squeezing.

“Love you, Lo,” he said.

“Love you, Thor,” Loki replied.

—

In the end, there was nothing else to do but forge on. They had always fucked like rabbits and had no intention of stopping, though the enthusiasms of their youth had through the years been replaced by more intimate positions and more careful attentions, their love quieter but no less fierce.

They found new positions to fuck in, ones that favored lying down and pressing close together. They spooned, Loki’s back plastered to Thor’s chest, Thor rutting between Loki’s thighs. They faced each other, kissing while their hands brought each other off.

At least, Thor thought, his cock never seemed to age. It rose faithfully at Loki’s touch, as it always had.

—

One afternoon in late autumn, they were dozing on the couch when Loki began to search for something underneath the cushions.

“What is it?” Thor asked, drowsy with spiced tea and gingerbread cookies fresh from the oven.

“My reading glasses,” Loki muttered.

Thor grinned, pointing to the top of his own head.

Loki flushed, raised his hand, and put his glasses on.

—

“It suits you,” Loki said one day, seeing Thor study himself in the mirror.

“Being fat?” Thor asked.

“Softness,” Loki replied.

It suited Loki as well, Thor often thought. It suited them, softness.

Thor’s belly started rounding and became Loki’s favorite napping spot. Loki’s hard, sleek lines mellowed into gentle slopes, the curve of his shoulders less bony, his ass plush when he sat on Thor’s lap.

They always found new ways to love each other.


	3. Chapter 3

There was a pregnant silence in the Council Room, but it took Thor a moment longer than everyone else to notice it. 

When he looked up from the morning’s report in his hand, everyone assembled at the table quickly averted their eyes, pretending to be engrossed in the agenda. _Hydroponics crop yield_ , it said, followed by _temperature regulation_ and _fuel restock_. Riveting stuff. 

Thor’s brow furrowed, and he resisted the urge to glance down at himself—the nightmares about coming to council without his pants on had plagued him for centuries, but he was certain he was fully-clothed today.

So what…?

“Majesty,” Runa piped up. A collective breath was held around the table. “There’s—I mean—if you haven’t noticed, sire—“

“There’s a snake on your head, Majesty,” said Heimdall, without having to look up. All-Seeing and all that, Thor supposed.

“Oh,” Thor said. He reached up and gave the snake a little pet. “Yes, he’s very sleepy this morning. Could barely get myself out of bed. This was the, ah, the best solution.”

There was another tense pause. 

Aldis cleared her throat, and the council desisted, deciding as one body that they really didn’t need or want to know more.

About halfway through the meeting, Thor felt a shifting of weight on his head, and soon a tongue flickered against his neck. Then again, more insistently.

“Patience, _kaerr_ ,” Thor murmured in an undertone, stroking his fingers soothingly along cool scale. 

The snake pulled away, and Thor could almost imagine him huffing.

Beside him, Runa flushed a stunning shade of pink.

—

Thor had been in the middle of a meeting when the whole thing began. 

One of the healers—one of the few they had left, a young redheaded girl named Sigyn—burst into Council, her hair and clothing in disarray. The front of her healer’s smock was splattered with blood.

“Majesty,” she said, remarkably steady as she walked over to Thor, ignoring the muttering of his advisors.

When she was close enough, she leaned in and said, “It is your brother, sire.”

Thor barely remembered the frantic jog through the ship, his head buzzing with static, desperately trying not to think of Loki hurt—Loki dying—Thor had only just gotten him back, he couldn’t _bear_ —

Sigyn had caught up with him at the door of the infirmary, panting, only because he could not bring himself to go inside.

“Is he—” Thor asked. His gaze was drawn, inevitably, to her bloody smock.

Her eyes widened and she shook her head vehemently, “Oh, Norns, no, sire, it’s not his blood, we were—well, we were helping someone to deliver—and he must have spent too much seidr to help her through it—we ran out of anaesthesia a week ago—”

“Take me to him,” Thor said, then added a _please_ , at the wide-eyed look Sigyn gave him.

They took him past the sick and the healing, to a more secluded room where another healer—Halle, Thor remembered, because he was Runa’s brother and there were so little of them left, it was the least Thor could do to remember everyone—took a pile of clothes from the bed and handed it to Thor. 

Thor took them with both hands, puzzled.

“These are Loki’s clothes,” he said. “But where is—”

At the sound of Thor’s voice, there was a shuffling within the pile of leathers and cloths. 

Thor stared, with apprehension and wonder, as the head of a small snake poked out of one of Loki’s sleeves.

“Oh,” Thor said. 

—

He took the snake—Loki—back to his room and set him on the bed, where he immediately curled up on Thor’s pillow and seemed to fall asleep. Without the shock and panic at the thought of Loki being hurt to prop Thor up, he found himself shedding his clothes and slipping into bed as well, making sure to give Loki enough space.

When he woke up in the morning, it was to an armful of naked, warm brother. 

“I think the loss of Asgard is affecting my seidr,” Loki explained later on, after Thor had kissed him breathless and reassured the both of them that Loki was whole and hale. “My body’s defense mechanism is to turn into something that uses the least amount of energy.”

“Don’t you need seidr to take on a different form?” Thor asked. 

Loki shook his head. “I can turn into anything, as long as it’s me.”

“Okay,” Thor said, though he didn’t really understand. “Will this happen again?”

“If I keep using my seidr, yes,” Loki said. “And I have no intention of stopping. There’s so much—there’s too much that needs to be done.”

“Stay close to me, then,” Thor said, his hand splayed on the small of Loki’s back, his voice gone tight with emotion. “It’s a big ship and you’re such a small thing as a snake.”

That earned Thor a bite to the neck, quick and vicious, but it was not a _no_.

—

As they journeyed towards Midgard over the course of the next few months, Loki shifted in and out of his snake form and Aesir form, showing up in Thor’s pocket as a coil of green and black scale, only to greet Thor in bed the next day pale and lithe, with all his limbs accounted for. 

As a snake, Loki sought warmth, following the instinct to bask in the heat of the sun. Their course did not take them close enough to any suns, so Loki settled for the next best thing, which was the heat of Thor’s body. He often curled himself around Thor’s neck, a loose torque, the cool rope of his reptile body warming up in accordance with Thor’s skin. 

Thor could not say he disliked it. In fact, he liked it a bit too much—but so did Loki, else he would not have kept doing it. It was a welcome comfort for both brothers, sorely needed in the wake of Ragnarok, of the years they’d spent broken apart.

—

The only times Thor did not like it was when Loki left regurgitated eggshells on the bed, but there were things he was willing to put up with for love, and this was the least of Loki’s bad habits.

And he had to admit, it was rather endearing to come back to the room to find his snake brother laid out on the bed, the shapes of his meal rounding his belly like a pearl necklace. 

“You’re going to feel sick when you turn back,” Thor said, stroking Loki’s little head. Loki’s pink tongue flickered out, like he was blowing Thor a raspberry.

—

As their journey grew longer and their time away from Asgard lengthened, Loki took to his snake form more and more often. Thor wondered if it really was just the lack of seidr that kept making him shift.

Loki had always felt emotions more keenly than anyone would have thought. And Thor wouldn’t have blamed him if he needed to hide into another body to escape his grief. As a snake, Loki thought snake thoughts and wanted snake things: food and warmth and sleep. 

Thor envied his brother this form of escape as much as he was grateful that Loki had it. 

And even as Loki took longer and longer to come back to Thor, he always did, always returned no matter how difficult it was to be a _person_ , to think person thoughts and feel person emotions.

“Sometimes I think you’re all that’s keeping me tethered,” Loki said, one night, after a week as a snake. He always came back slow and quiet, sedate, clinging to Thor like his blood still ran cold. 

“Don’t let go,” Thor urged, begged, really. 

When Loki curled closer, Thor thought he could hear the whisper of scales against the sheets.

“Being a person has its perks,” Loki replied, tucking himself against Thor.

He started to roll his hips, and Thor groaned softly, clutching Loki to him. 

—

“You’re going to what?”

“Moult,” Loki said, sounding impatient. “I’m going to _shed_ , and I’m going to need your help.”

“I—okay,” Thor sputtered. 

It was strangely beautiful, Loki’s moult. Thor supposed it was something Loki always wished he could do: leave behind the old weight of himself and grow into a new skin. Thor helped him along, his fingers careful, the act of it strangely intimate. 

When they were done, Loki slid his body around Thor’s hand and wrist and flicked his tongue contentedly across Thor’s knuckles.

—

“Thor, I, uh, I found this really cool snake in the dining hall? It was trying to eat my egg but then I remembered you love snakes and you’ve been hanging around with—”

Bruce yelped as the snake in his hand reared back and snapped forward, clamping its mouth around the soft skin between thumb and forefinger.

“Oh my GOD, is this thing venomous? Am I going to DIE?”

Thor suppressed the urge to laugh. “Loki, please, let the good doctor go. I’m sorry, Banner, but you’ll be okay. He only eats eggs.”

“Wait, did you call this snake Loki?”

“Yes,” Thor said slowly. Everyone on board must have known by now who Thor’s constant companion was.

“I’ve seen this snake go under your _shirt_.”

“He gets cold!” Thor said. 

Bruce dropped Loki as if he was suddenly on fire, and before Thor could reprimand him, the little snake slithered towards Thor and slid himself around Thor’s ankle, then slid up Thor’s thigh.

“Um,” Thor said.

“Good BYE,” Bruce said, and turned around and left, shaking his head.

“I hope you’re pleased,” Thor said, reaching down and letting Loki wind around his hand. He held his brother close to his face and let Loki flick his tongue against Thor’s cheek.

“I know, I know,” Thor said. “I love you too, brother.”

—

Their arrival on Midgard was a relief for a number of reasons. It was good to get out of the ship, to enter the atmosphere and feel _land_ under their feet, to breathe fresh instead of recycled air. 

It also seemed that Loki and Thor could draw power from Midgard that same way they could on Asgard. The land had worshipped them once, and the land still remembered. 

With his seidr restored, Loki no longer needed to take to his snake form. Thor missed it, sometimes, the weight of his brother draped across his shoulders, around his neck. But Loki was right—there was so much to do, so much more to be done, and they threw themselves into the task of rebuilding their home on new soil. 

It was only a year later, on the anniversary of the day of Asgard’s destruction, that Thor found his brother curled up in a basket of knitting. Thor picked him up and carefully tucked him to his chest.

—

Thor still found Loki in his snake form, though less often: curled up on the chair by the fire, hiding in the cavern of Thor’s boot, gorging himself on eggs in the kitchen, sunning himself in the flower pot on the windowsill.

And always, Thor waited, more patient now than he had ever been, for the days when Loki would come back to him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> quick note that it's not advised to help snakes shed their skin unless they're having trouble!
> 
> also the line "i can turn into anything, as long as it's me" is from the agent of asgard comic. i totally didn't realize i'd lifted it directly until someone mentioned it and i went to check, my bad!

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!


End file.
